Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Vatican official takes wide stance against Satanism

Monsignor Tomasso Stenico, third from top man in the Vatican's Congregation of the Clergy, inadvertently appeared on Italian TV last week. Stenico shared his thoughts on homosexuality and sado-masochism with a young man whom he'd met online and then invited to his office across from St. Peter's. Unfortunately, the recipient of his favors turned out to be an employee of Italy's only independent television network and had brought along a hidden camera and mic.

Mgr Stenico asks the man, “Do you like me?” and tells him that he is very good-looking. When the young man expresses fears that having sex would be “a sin in the eyes of the Church”, the priest replies: “I do not feel it would be sinful.” Drawn on the subject of sado-masochistic sex, the monsignor says that these are “inner choices, the psychological basis of a personality”. The young man continues to raise moral and religious objections to actually having sex, until the priest becomes irritated, says that he has no time left and takes him back to the lift. On parting, the Monsignor tells him that he is “really tasty” and that he can telephone him or send him a message.

La 7, the news channel, had disguised the faces and the voices, but a number of people in the Vatican had been to Msgr. Stenico's office and recognized the furnishings. (News accounts do not specify whether it was the Sacred Flagellum in the umbrella stand or the Grand Inquisitor's Mask that jogged their memories.) The Vatican, always quick to respond when sex is at issue, immediately suspended Fr. Stenico from his post.

While in other circumstances he might have welcomed a suspension, Fr. Stenico has refused this time to be left dangling. Like Idaho Republican Senator and Hall-of-Famer Larry Craig, who has stipulated that he takes a wide stance when seated on the toilet, Fr. Stenico says he was taking a wide stance trying to purge the bowels of the Church of Satanic seductors—

... he claimed that he was pretending to be gay in an attempt to unmask a Satanic plot to seduce Catholic priests to homosexuality and thus discredit the Church. “I only pretended I was gay to study how priests are seduced,” said Mgr Stenico, a frequent guest on television programmes discussing religious issues. “There are people who go after them . . . I really believe there is a diabolical plan by groups of Satanists.”

Similarly, I believe in the end it will be revealed that Sen. Craig, who has filed an appeal of his appeal to overturn his guilty plea,1 was on a mission to expose undercover cops who hang out in airport men's rooms and try to discredit traveling Republican Senators. In the end it will certainly turn out to be some sort of Satanic Democratic treachery.

1This is now referred to as the "Larry Craig Stall."
As columnist Froma Harrop writes of Craig's reversal of his decision to resign at the end of September, "avocados stay firm longer than a Larry Craig deadline."
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